Zuckerberg called it ‘an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content – you are in it’. Advocates imagine it as something like the next stage of the web, based not around flat pages and social-media feeds but on 3D virtual worlds. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, referring to an all-consuming digital world that could kill you if you downloaded the wrong file. Former health secretary Matt Hancock is in on the action, becoming the first MP to have his own metaverse doppelgänger. The investment bank Citi predicts the metaverse could be worth up to $13 trillion by 2030. According to a recent report by McKinsey, companies invested more than $120 billion in metaverse-related technology and infrastructure in the first five months of 2022, compared to $57 billion in all of 2021. Still, having bet his company’s entire identity on the concept, and declared it his mission to ‘bring the metaverse to life’, the 38-year-old tech baron is not about to back down. Even Zuckerberg himself would later admit it was ‘pretty basic’. The image, taken inside Meta’s flagship virtual reality (VR) app, Horizon Worlds, and posted on Instagram last month, was not a strong omen for Zuckerberg’s hopes of building ‘the metaverse’. Did Meta really spend $10 billion (£9.3 billion) last year to bring this to fruition? In the background was a miniature Eiffel Tower and some crudely rendered spherical bushes.
In the foreground was a smooth-faced digital puppet ostensibly representing Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta (née Facebook). It was the ‘selfie’ mocked around the world.
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